How secure is your website, or your Web hosting?

In reviewing or renewing your Web hosting plan, you basically go through the month-to-month costs, reflect on your dealings with billing or tech support and consider your website’s uptime. Most of us don’t go much further unless, of course, there are problems to solve or other Web hosts to evaluate.

Not surprisingly, many of us don’t worry about our website being hacked.

Kevin Mitnick's name may be familiar. He's an ex-hacker, now converted to security consultant and he doesn't wonder about being hacked either because it happens all the time. So much so that his Web host booted him out because they couldn't quite handle that burden. Luckily, another stepped up soon after. In speaking to Firehost, Mitnick's savior, you soon realize that being hacked is something you should be concerned about even if it hasn't happened yet. I've never worried about credit card fraud until it happened to me in May and again only two days ago courtesy of some weird outfit called CMGFreeshipping.com.

To the point, Firehost's CEO Chris Drake has been in the news of late because his Web hosting company is stepping in front of the bullets (so to speak) for Mitnick. In speaking to Drake, he recommends one simple question to ask your hosting provider: Is your company able to prevent my website from being hacked?

Firehost's Drake is willing to bet many will yes to the fact that they prevent certain security violations with antivirus, hardware protection through firewalls, and the latest networking gear from Cisco but he seriously doubts they can prevent hacks at the application level, which have become more prominent with the rise of the open source movement that has fostered easier access to downloads and installation codes.

"Our roots are in Web development and application development. Traditional IT departments understand network and hardware protection but there's a void at the application level. Traditional companies can't do it...our Web developers have been brought up to that security level to combat these attacks," Drake emphasized.

Considering that Twitter was down for an hour or more this morning because of similar denial of service attacks, maybe the tweet 'can you stop my website from being hacked' will surface a few hundred times. Drake, I'd wager, is ready to respond to that.